Marco Rubio Kinda Threatened to Beat Up Alex Jones on Video

The U.S. Capitol is filled with even dumber, more morally bankrupt, fame-hungry lunatics than usual. Today a group of octogenarian lawmakers is holding essentially a sham hearing on transparency and censorship in online media while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, along with others, testifies on Capitol Hill.

But America's absolute dumbest stooges have crashed the event. Infowars' Alex Jones, whose career is rapidly disintegrating after he was booted from Facebook, iTunes, and other online outlets brought a group of live-streamers and other fame-hungry, far-right personalities to the hearing, turning the affair into something worthy of a WWE wrestling match — complete with at least one (not entirely undeserved) threat from Florida's generally hapless junior senator, Marco Rubio.

The whole exchange is hilarious and nearly Lovecraftian. Rubio, dead-eyed, sad, and wooden, stares down Jones, a humorless monster that his own party helped nurture, a hobgoblin who is now eating the Republican Party from the inside out as it feeds on chaos and insanity.

The exchange would be absolutely incredible if the stout, bearded, and paranoid Jones were in any way kidding, but he is instead the most self-serious man alive. Jones is, obviously, using the day to launch himself into headlines once again.

In the clip (which, with full apologies to everyone reading this, comes from far-right neanderthal Cassandra Fairbanks), Jones wedges his way into a hallway press gaggle and starts shouting random, outlandish crap at Rubio. He began by howling about "Democrats purging conservatives" from social media before Rubio turned to him and tried to lob a half-hearted joke.

"Is that a heckler at a press gaggle?" Rubio said with a laugh. After the senator claimed he didn't know who Jones was (a dubious claim), the radio host, who has spent years spreading a conspiracy theory that Rubio is a closeted gay man, began howling insults.

Of course, you can't out-argue or out-debate Jones, who is shameless and insane. And if there's one thing Jones does intrinsically understand, it's that lawmakers have absolutely no idea how to handle him. Rubio's veiled threat gave Jones all the ammo he needed.

"Oh, he'll beat me up!" Jones responded. "You're not going to silence me. You're not going to silence America. You are literally like a little gangster thug. Rubio just threatened to physically take care of me! Look at that."

As Rubio then tried to answer questions about the potential nationalization of social media platforms, Jones, smelling blood, continued yelling increasingly outrageous nonsense.

"The Democrats are raping the Republicans!" Jones bellowed in his comedically gruff voice. "The Democrats are raping Infowars!"

Eventually, Rubio had enough. Before leaving, he told the press gaggle it could "stay and talk to this clown here." Jones, in a homophobic threat, then shouted that Rubio could "go back to [his] bathhouse." (It's worth noting the virulently homophobic Jones was caught watching transgender porn last month.)

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Jones otherwise spent this morning live-streaming himself on Periscope, the Twitter-owned live-streaming service he is somehow still allowed to use no matter how many times he calls for armed struggle against the U.S. government. As part of the streaming stunt, he also brought along Pizzagate truther Jack Posobiec, who pathetically claimed Jones spent the day lobbing "truth bombs" at lawmakers.

Jerry Iannelli is a staff writer for Miami New Times. He graduated with honors from Temple University. He then earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He moved to South Florida in 2015.

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